Nulli Secuncus

Releases by Creative Sources indeed hardly land on our desk, despite their extensive catalogue. They are up to catalogue number 222 with this new release, and like we should know from the ones we reviewed in their earlier days, all of their music is from the field of improvisation. Here we have a trio of Andreas Willers on electric and acoustic guitars, Christian Marien on drums and percussion and Meinrad Kneer on double bass. The music was recorded in February of this year at Ausland, one of Berlin's finer places for such music and then mixed a month later, so perhaps taped to multi-track and then mixed, or perhaps it's edited down. Either way is fine. THese players aren't well-known to me, even when Kneer every now and then mails releases on his Evil Rabbit label. These nine pieces, totaling some forty six minutes, show a few things: excellent improvising skills obviously, with a fine love of playing their instruments kind of 'as intended' by them who build such instruments and not like resonant sound boards. But that can result in a fine bit of mean noise, such as in 'Ubersturz'. Stylistically these three men aren't confined to one style. That 'Ubersturz' piece is noise, and rock like, but then they might play as easily something that is much more acoustic jazz like, of course always in a total free mode. This gives the release quite a varied impression, which works pretty well here, and could appeal to a wider audience than those hardcore improvisation/free jazz lovers, but to anyone with an open mind towards free rock, free noise and free jazz. All you need is an open mind, but then this music has a lot to give. And then right after this CD, I happened to stick on the one by Lean Left, partly because I assumed it would be along similar lines, and partly because it was the next one on the pile 'to be heard'. Lean Left is a quartet of Terrie Ex on 'left' guitar, and Andy Moor on 'right' guitar. Both are members of The Ex - Terrie Ex even the founding member - a Dutch punk band, if you still may call them like that, who have broadened their horizons considerably. Here, as Lean Left, they team up for sixty seven minutes with Ken Vandermark on tenor saxophone and B clarinet and Paal Nilssen-Love. Now, normally the way Vandermark plays would not be my cup of tea, but I am more than happy to make exceptions. For the better part of these sixty-seven minutes I was concentrated on doing some boring manual work on a website, copying and checking links and such like. And all of this time the music from Lean Left was blearing away in the background. Sixty seven minutes of unrelentless free improv ised music with a strong free jazz tag attached to it. It's not always full on craziness with these four men, but most of the time it actually is. I was thinking that while doing all this silly work, I preferred the loud, ongoing noisy bits of of this CD, but when I was listening more closely, even concentrating, than it seemed to me that I actually was more attracted by the more introspective moments, and less by its all out free jazz playing. Not something I would play everybody, working or otherwise, but one that I seemed to enjoy quite a bit

A gorgeous free improvisation session between guitarist Andreas Willers, drummer Christian Marien and doublebassist Meinrad Kneer. I’m already quite fond of the latter (especially in his work with pianist Albert van Veenendaal). Here, he shines with his choices of textures and intensities – praise that also applies to the other two protagonists. Willers’ electric guitar occasionally soars with surprising delight (the short “arcoring”), but in general what strikes me is the intense yet easy-going group playing. Bravo

Another amazing master stroke of improvisational music by Portuguese label Creative Sources come from Ausland in Berlin, one of the most recommendable places in the lively German capital for lovers of this kind of music, where Andreas Willers (electric and acoustic guitars), Christian Marien (drums and percussions) and Meinrad Kneer (double bass) recorded "Nulli Secundus" (Latin expression meaning "Second to None") before mixing it one month later. The references to electromechanical engines, turbines and similar stuff both in the artwork and the titles could suggest the sound this trio manages to built should be "semantically" connected to this branch of human knowledge and technology and certainly their funny interaction could remind the functioning (or sometimes malfunction) of those contraptions, but there's a vague sense of humanity which got added by some lopsided melodies and some crescendoes in the midst and in the mist of metallic strindencies, bangs, clangors and mechanical sighs that I cannot associate it to a machine. Moreover they show a remarkable heterogeneity as you could feel that some track lean towrds jazz standards, other ones toward rock or even noise declensions, so that I think an association with a humanoid automaton could be apter to their funny outgrowth. You could imagine this being in the attempt of mimicking Jimi Hendrix ("Shoct", "ubersturz"), playing flamenco ("Triolog") or a serenade ("Froschball"), whose final outcome got inevitably influenced by some oxidizing spring or rusty gearwheels, unoiled or unfastened parts and other problems. Check it out!